To provide context, I planned a 6 week sabbatical around living in Japan. I’ve been here for over a month now. I worked here for 2 weeks, then my brother, nephew, and our friend Aaron visited for 9-ish days. It’s been about 3 weeks since they’ve been gone and I’m settling into just living here. The TL;DR, I’m glad I did this trip because it gave me the answer I was looking for. I would not want to live here on a long term basis. At least not if I was tied to working in Tokyo. I’ll break down why below.
Work
If my boss told me that I could work from here tomorrow, I would still likely reject it. I was going into our Tokyo office here for those 2 weeks, but everyone I needed to interact with was in the US or Romania. There is very little overlap in those hours. So I would come in very early, maybe 7:00-7:30 AM, right when access to the elevators unlocked, sit down and get maybe 1-2 hours of communications with the folks in the US. Then they would go home. I would have a number of tickets and items to work on and I would get started on those. I was able to be very productive on those items as nobody was disturbing me, but when I would hit a point where I needed a code review or had questions about work processes I was trying to solve, I was stuck. Our Romanian staff would come online just as my day was ending. If I jumped back on the VPN at the apartment, I might be able to get a PR reviewed and merged, but at some point I need to stop. 12+ hour days aren’t going to help. With all that being said, if that was suddenly the work environment I found myself in, it would be incredibly frustrating having to deal with the near 24h delay to move forward on any unanswered question I might have. If I was working with staff in the office, that’s a little different, but it would still mean living in the Tokyo area.
Life
This bring me to the life side of things. I do enjoy Tokyo, it’s an incredible place to be, but it is lacking for someone like myself who enjoys a lot of outdoor endurance sports. I brought a bike with me, and I have put in the work to get some real riding in. The issue is that you really have to work to get those rides in. You spend an excessive amount of time stopped at all the traffic lights around here. So much so that if you stayed just to riding in the city, you never get your HR up to a sustained elevated rate. I have to slowly make my way South to the Tama River. Once there, you can ride on the paved pathways that line both sides of it. This bypasses a lot of the traffic lights, but you’re still having to navigate around a lot of other pathway users. It’s a lot both physically and mentally because you’re on high alert all the time.
Conclusion
I’m going to keep this one short, because I have comparison topics I would like to create in separate posts. As I stated at the top, I don’t think living here is the right choice for me. It would be similar with a lot of other dense urban areas I think. I used to live in downtown SLC, but in 15-20 minutes I could be riding on single track trails up the side of a mountain. Without similar type access, these become real blockers to the things I enjoy. These are very real things I consider when I am looking for a place to live. How close is the nearest trailhead. Is there a park or similar space nearby where I can go for an more uninterrupted run? So if I did live here, I would probably try and find a place closer to the river, but it is still very limiting in what it can offer.
